WCW Nitro Musings

[wandshogun09]

15 hours ago, Dr. Alan Grant said:

I took a brief detour to watch Fall Brawl 95 before continuing with Nitro. It was an okay show. Flyin’ Brian and Johnny B. Badd had an awesome match.

It’s not the most popular opinion but I think Marc Mero/Johnny B Badd was actually really good in the ring for a fairly short window of time covering the end of his WCW run in late 95 to his early Wildman stuff in WWF in 96. The Pillman match you mentioned is really good and I vaguely remember enjoying his match with DDP from Halloween Havoc 95 as well. Then as the Wildman he was having really solid matches for his first year in the WWF with the likes of Triple H, Austin, Goldust, Owen etc. The knee injury in 97 put an end to that little run and then he came back with the ‘Marvelous Marc’ boxer gimmick later that year. But for a time, I thought he was better than most make out. 

I don’t see it so much now but there was a time when Mero was getting shat on by other wrestlers from his era as if he was some awful wrestler but I never got that. The early Johnny B Badd matches weren’t great when he was green. But he clearly 100% committed to the gimmick and played it well. He got a lot better later though. Can’t help thinking a lot of the slagging off he got from wrestlers was rooted in jealousy because he was one of the first to get a guaranteed contract in the WWF. Because there were way worse wrestlers knocking about than Mero. Similar with Lex Luger. This rep he has as an awful in ring performer is bollocks and it mostly comes from wrestlers rather than fans. 

Edited December 16, 2024 by wandshogun09

[Dr. Alan Grant]

Oh, I’m absolutely loving Johnny B. Badd. Luger’s a strange one. His WWE run, both as the Narcissist and all American poster boy, I find to be pretty rubbish bar the occasional decent match. But in The WCW, it’s like watching a different man. Fiery promos, good feud with Savage and I love the torture rack as a finish. I really wish I hadn’t left it this late to watch Nitro if it ends up disappearing soon.

[wandshogun09]

Oh yeah I’m definitely talking about WCW Lex. Can’t remember much of his WWF run that I actually enjoyed, even as a kid when I was lapping any old shite up as long as it was wrestling. 

[Merzbow]

Looking back he always seemed like he was maybe a little homesick, many of his closes NWA pals weren't there and I'd imagine things were done just so very differently backstage and the road travel etc even if he was getting a huge push. The moment he gets to fuck around with Sting again he seems like a whole new person.

Edited December 16, 2024 by Merzbow

[Chili]

I also think Luger looked at the booking too and thought 'yeah, I'll phone that in'. Great news Lex, we're gonna marry you up with Tatanka on the road for the next 9 months'.

With Marc Mero, I think basically he had an extremely short window of when he was good and that was between 1994 to his knee injury in 1997 that just seemed to absolutely zap him of whatever he had built in those years. I forgot he only began the same year as Kevin Nash so by the time 1994 comes around he's naturally getting better. That knee injury and the owner and head writer constantly fantasising about fucking his wife really did him in, hardly his fault either. The hatred he got especially from Foley which even he admitted was childish jealousy was absolutely in my opinion the same reason other folks dumped on him/his work. Just petty jealousy, because you hardly hear any other shite about him.

Edited December 16, 2024 by Chili

[Merzbow]

  Sure it's just another episode of Nitro but it starts with one of the unsung brilliant moments in WCW, Tony is excellent here with his emotional speech and walk-off.

 

[tiger_rick]

Stuck on a couple of Nitros recently that have popped up on the WCW Vault. Both from Feb 2000 during that post-Russo phase before him and Bischoff came back. It's a dull period with a couple of dreadful PPVs and so many terrible acts but these are two of the worst wrestling shows ever. 

He's somehow a bit of a forum favourite but, bollocks to that, the "Chosen One" Jeff Jarrett is the worst wrestler IN HISTORY. There's nothing worse than this. Jeff doesn't have the charisma or mic work to justify the hundreds of segments he's in. He looks shit, he's backed up by the fucking Harris Brothers, he's in the nWo but no-one else seems to be, he's constantly repeating himself or using one of his hideously unfunny insults, he's the chosen one but apparently gets screwed all the time and he seems to be having some authority battle with Kevin Nash (who is the worst babyface ever at this point too) while also feuding with Sid. If that's not bad enough, the Harris Brothers keep coming out attacking people and interupting the show in a rip-off of Kane - bearing in mind Russo isn't here. Kane is a MAGA dweeb but he was 8 billion times more over at his nadir than the Nazi twins were here. What a fucking comparison.

The Dustin Rhodes heel turn on Feb 21st show might be the worst timed and directed heel turn ever. Sid is chasing Jarrett back stage, the cameras and directors are trying to follow this epic foot-race and Rhodes just turns on Terry Funk in the middle of it for god-knows what reason and the commentators can barely get it across because they have to sell the wacky race going on between a guy who'd be the 84th most over person in the WWF mid-card and a massive bloke whose resting heartbeat reads "system shutting down". Wild stuff. And reminder, no Russo.

I love these shows. They're fucking abysmal.

[The Gaffer]

Watched these recently as well and yeah, I noticed how Jeff lingered with the nWo presentation for weeks after nWo 2000 had already dissolved. Wrestlers repping a dead faction is one of the worst tropes going. X-Pac moving into X-Pac heat phase and making DX seem like something that happened ten million years ago in the fall of 2000, Shawn Michaels coming out to the full DX entrance against Cena at WrestleMania 23. It always just looks and feels really odd and sad. 

The only thing you can say for these shows is that they're at least a little more energetic than the interminable 1999 shows and they done away with the cement grey livery everywhere around the ring so the rebrand doesn't end up looking quite as bad as it originally did. It's a weird hybrid of 80s goofiness and the car crashing booking that was to come later in the year. 

I'm convinced most people aren't even aware this stuff exists, with the prevailing headcanon being that Russo took over in October 1999 and stayed at the helm for a full year. It's a perfect set up for Russo's whole "He can write a great first chapter" thing for the reset Nitro in April. After sitting through months of this stuff that show did look more big time. At points it's like they were purposefully anesthetising the product so that it would seem like a bigger deal when they heated it up again, which I remember was something thrown around about the WWE in 2004 when Eddie & Angle at WrestleMania XX became talismanic of the new, more conservative in ring style they were going for. 

To my surprise - however - I did find Lex Luger 2000 a hoot. The new millennium update of the narcissist gimmick kind of makes sense as the best possible way to present him, and he looks like he's having fun in a phoning it in kind of way.

Oh yeah, the Nash commissioner skits from this time period. Some of the worst 'insider' comedy ever, even by WCW standards.

 

Edited March 3 by The Gaffer

[Browser Brady]

On 12/13/2024 at 7:31 PM, Chili said:

Can we just take a moment to acknowledge Nitro's absolutely banging hard theme. Given it was two years away from Raw using All Together Now/Thorn in Your Eye/Marilyn Manson and they were still in their ambulance siren sax theme era, Nitro really looked and SOUNDED so much more livelier than Raw did (taped or not taped). They must have shat it slightly seeing how good it looked (obviously down to that dastardly Ted Turner), but what a theme song. Hope it plays Vince out as he's taken into his holding cell. 

 

I always associate the time when they changed the original music and set as the start of the decline proper of WCW..

 

New music and set = shit.

[BomberPat]

On 3/3/2026 at 9:54 AM, tiger_rick said:

He's somehow a bit of a forum favourite but, bollocks to that, the "Chosen One" Jeff Jarrett is the worst wrestler IN HISTORY. There's nothing worse than this. Jeff doesn't have the charisma or mic work to justify the hundreds of segments he's in.

I love Jeff, and I think after the last few years there's been a lot of reassessment of his career, and so history will be a lot kinder to him than it would have been if his podcast and AEW run had never happened, but this period is unforgivably shit. Just the perfect storm of awful booking and someone woefully ill-prepared for the push they're getting, with an approach to wrestling that served neither Jarrett's strengths nor the audience's tastes. I hated Jarrett for fucking years, and it took seeing him wrestle live on a TNA house show to change my mind, because outside of all the overbooked matches and him being pushed above his station, just in a more or less standalone match, I could finally see what his strengths were and how good he was.